Research conducted in the first year of the program has been concerned with the role of schemas in processing social information. Social schemas are subjective theories about the social environment that influence how individuals process information, how they make judgments, attributions, and inferences about the elements on this environment, and how they decide upon a course of action. They represent the ways in which the social world has been differentiated and articulated in memory. In a series of studies we have examined the structure and function of schemas about the self as instances of social schemas. Schemas about two very different aspects of the self--sex-role and body weight--have been investigated. With respect to sex role, stereotypically musculine, stereotypically feminine, androgynous individuals, and individuals without sex-role schemas clearly differ in the content and organization of their cognitive structures about sex roles. These differential structures result in differential information processing of information relevant to sex roles. That is, these individuals differ in the content of schema-related judgments and decisions, in the processing time necessary for these judgments and decisions, and in the quality, content, and patterns of recognition and recall of schema related materials. Similar findings have been obtained in two studies on schemas about body weight. Converging findings from these studies provide evidence for the schema construct as a selective and directive mechanism that results in differential attention to, and processing of, information about the self in particular domains. Studies in progress include one on the relationship of schemas to selective attention or to the initial encoding of information in the social environment, and one on the relationship of self-schemas to schemas or theories about others. Progress on this project has been facilitated by the development in the RCGD Laboratory of a PDP-11 system with a comprehensive set of programs for the on-line control of self-schema experiments. In the next year we will attempt to develop a series of models of schema operation.